Printing on Non-porous Substrates with Thermal Ink Jet

This paper addresses the challenges of using aggressive inks in thermal ink jet (TIJ) print cartridges to enable printing on non-porous substrates. Non-aqueous inks are required to achieve the performance characteristics desired including print speeds, image quality and image durability on non-porous substrates. Thermal ink jet technology has traditionally been considered only for aqueous inks. Some of the challenges of using non-aqueous inks in thermal ink jet print cartridges are being solved and thus the benefits of thermal ink jet are now available for non-porous printing applications. As the TIJ technology can be extended for jetting not only inks, but also other fluids, the terms ink and fluid are used interchangeably in this paper.